


Follow Through

by Macadamanaity



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), MASH (TV)
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-29
Updated: 2009-11-29
Packaged: 2017-10-03 23:50:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Macadamanaity/pseuds/Macadamanaity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A head nurse of a certain M*A*S*H unit saves the day with help from a visiting doctor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Follow Through

**Author's Note:**

  * For [singlecrow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/gifts).



> This was written for Loneraven on her birthday.

“Doctor!” she shouted across the room.

“Comingcomingcoming…” he chanted, hurrying briskly towards her, doing a lanky hop-step over the stretcher–and its occupant–blocking the aisle.

Captain Pierce helped her hold down Private Lowrey as he seized violently, his face grim and worried.

“Think this is stage three?” she asked, almost rhetorically. It had hit them so quickly, this virus. First the fever, then the rash. The weaker ones, the ones who had been recovering from other illnesses and serious wounds had begun dying before they even reached this point.

The 4077th wasn’t sleeping on the job, of course. The entire camp had worked as the well-oiled machine it was. It never would have gotten this far except none of their initial tests were able to tell them what it was because it looked like nothing the doctors had ever seen before. Then, one by one, the doctors, nurses, and corpsmen began falling prey to it, adding to the already full ward of patients.

Henry and Frank were both well into stage one by now, which meant that Major Houlihan was effectively the commanding officer, a fact she would have been happy to rub in Captain Pierce’s and McIntyre’s faces on any other occasion, but this wasn’t like the flu–others weren’t going to eventually pull through given time, there was no preventative inoculation for those who hadn’t succumbed, and there was no way to treat what they couldn’t understand.

Instead, it fell to her to quarantine the camp, signing their death certificates if they couldn’t find a solution cut off from the rest of Korea and the armed forces. She gave the order with a grim efficiency that would have made even her father flinch.

Ten minutes after Radar, unusually flushed and unsteady, relayed the message to all nearby units and choppers, the corporal looked up suddenly with that distinctive tilt to his demeanor and her heart plummeted in horror.

“Choppers?” Kellye asked quietly, echoing Margaret’s sentiment. She could see Hawkeye shaking his head in denial as he checked Klinger’s temperature, as if his perpetual movement could halt the inevitable.

But then Radar shook his head too.

“No, it’s…” he paused. “Someone’s here.”

With no further stuttering or preamble, he dashed out of the building at top speed.

Margaret sighed.

“I think the fever’s taken hold. I’ll go get him.”

She jogged out and was looking around to see which way he had run when she heard the most peculiar sound. It _wasn’t_ a chopper, but it seemed to her like drums, surgical instruments rubbing together, and a broken down jeep all rolled into one. It was coming from the Swamp.

She drew the pistol her father had given her before she had shipped out, and followed the residual noises.

She turned the corner quickly and walked straight into Radar, who was looking up at a thin man with the most unmilitary of attire and frankly disgraceful hair. He was smiling at the young Corporal, stance most casual, when he saw her and her gun. When his smile faltered for that fraction of a second and then intensified blindingly, to the same degree that his posture became even more unassuming, she assessed him as no mere civilian at the same time that he was clearly not regular army.

“Identify yourself!” she barked. He slowly reached for a pocket in the left breast of his pinstriped suit jacket, which, she noted carefully, was too fitted to contain a projectile weapon, though it could probably hide the shape of a knife. He pulled out a small leather folder and handed it to Radar to hand to her, staying otherwise very still.

She opened it with one hand, keeping one eye on him.

“Doctor John Smith,” she read his ID aloud. “Scientific Advisor to the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce.” He nodded encouragingly.

“That’s right! And who might you be?” His British accent belied the international nature of his associations but,

“There’s no such thing as the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce.” She tightened her grip on the weapon.

“Too early, then?” he asked, nonsensically. “Pity. That one tends to be helpful when you military types are involved.” She opened her mouth to order Radar to find two healthy soldiers to take him into custody but he continued before she had drawn a breath, “I don’t suppose you’d believe I was a general, eh? Can’t be helped, I suppose. Now! Where to begin? First thing’s first.”

He drew something out of his side pocket that looked something like a piccolo and turned something at its base. It flashed blue. She narrowed her eyes.

“I don’t have time for these games! People are dying and we’re running out of time!”

“Exactly!” he said, stepping forward with a broad gesture to Radar.

Losing all patience, and hoping to scare this renegade into compliance, she pointed her gun a foot to the left of the man’s improbably red shoes and squeezed the trigger, bracing for the recoil.

The pistol clicked, but nothing else happened. Radar looked back to her, mouth agape, but the man merely raised an eyebrow.

“Picked that one up from the Sontarans. It’s an odd trick for them to have developed, for sure, since I’ve found the best way to stall out a conflict is to _not shoot people_, but I can’t say it hasn’t come in handy. Now, who are you?”

Radar recovered first.

“Radar O’Reilly, sir. Are you really a doctor?” He looked at the ID Margaret had been holding with a dubious expression the trusting Corporal usually reserved for the claims of what the slop in the mess tent actually was.

“I am. I’m here to help. I was…sent.” He met Margaret’s gaze as he said this in a serious tone that stood in contrast to his Hawkeye-like banter earlier. She overruled an inner voice that sounded suspiciously like Frank Burns warning her of constant vigilance against the treachery of the enemy and foreigners and believed him. After all, just because Colonel Flagg never was who he said he was, it didn’t mean he wasn’t who he said he might not be. And what choice did she have? She was in charge and help was help.

“Major Margaret Houlihan,” she offered, tucking her broken gun away perfunctorily. “Head Nurse. We can use an extra pair of hands and fresh eyes.”

“Pleased to meet you, Margaret Houlihan!”

“That’s Major, Doctor Smith,” she corrected, annoyed. She turned to lead him towards the hospital ward.

“And that’s just the Doctor, Major,” he added with a wink, holding his ground. “But something tells me I can’t go in there.”

Margaret shook her head.

“You’re exposed already, Doctor. I’ve been treating patients for the past 48 hours and the Corporal here is already showing sings of the infection. You broke quarantine by coming here, so there’s no time for squeamishness. I’m the ranking officer in camp, so until this emergency is over, you’re to do what I tell you outside of the hospital, and what Doctor Pierce tells you inside.”

“Ah, that’d be Hawkeye Pierce, then?” He pulled on his right earlobe, and looked around as if the man himself was about to appear from behind the supply tent.

She groaned. Of _course_ he knew Pierce. Who else but a friend of Hawkeye’s would be insane enough to descend upon a quarantined mobile army surgical hospital in a pinstriped suit and spiky hair armed with a woodwind instrument offering help and pacifism?

“Right, okay. I’ll just go to my… vehicle… and grab some of my more specialized equipment. Don’t let me hold you up any longer. I’ll just have young Mr. O’Reilly show me the way.”

Margaret stepped in front of both of them, blocking the way.

“The Corporal needs to get back before he gets worse. _I_ will escort you, Doctor. Corporal? Get back to Hawkeye, on the double! March!” They both jumped at her order, Radar with a look of terror and the Doctor, amusement.

He ambled back in the direction of the Swamp, instead of the road, and she almost corrected him until he opened its door and held it open for her. Before she could yell at him for wasting even more time, she saw it.

It stood out so starkly against everything else in the olive-drab tent, that blue box sitting there smack-dab on top of Frank Burns’ now-crushed cot.

“That’s against regulations,” was all she could think to offer. He chuckled.

“You have no idea.” He gestured her inside the tent.

He opened the box’s door, then, and walked in.

Maybe the fever had hit her too and she was already lying next to Frank back in the hospital, giving Pierce and McIntyre endless blackmail material.

Or maybe her impossible problem’s only solution was just as impossible.

She followed him in.

He watched her take in the room, his inappropriate good humour unabated. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something.

“You said you could help.”

“So I did. Right this way, Major!” He took her down a long corridor to a white space that looked nothing like any hospital room she had ever been in and that screamed ‘sick bay’ to her anyway. “You said you had been treating the infected for at least two days now?”

She confirmed this.

“Molto bene. Based on how quickly the bulk of your camp fell ill, and the symptoms Radar described to me, my really rather educated guess is you’ve got sufficient antibodies in your system at this point to allow me to figure out what this virus is and whip up something to treat it.” He held up a syringe. “Blood sample?”

She rolled up her sleeve without a word and he went to it immediately. She was now unsure how she had presumed him to be anything _but_ a doctor, as his gestures and actions betrayed an obvious professional competency, even if she didn’t know what the machinery she was now manipulating was or did.

“Come on, come on, come on…” he chanted at what might have been a miniature projector screen, as indecipherable writing began flooding it as if it were being poured down from above. It seemed to mean something just out of reach to him, as he pulled his hair until it was standing in at least two other directions. Finally it pinged, like a typewriter reaching the end of a row.

“AH ha!” he cried out. “Dundasia! Oh, that’s brilliant, that is. Couldn’t be infected by a nicer people!” He grinned and dashed back where they came from before she could respond. All she could do was continue to follow him, somewhat alarmed.

He began punching and pulling the buttons and levers on the console in the center of the domed room immediately, and the sound she had heard while chasing Radar in what had only been a short time earlier was all around her. It was the room. And the room was moving. She held on and did not make even the slightest sound of fear.

“Major Margaret Houlihan,” the Doctor called out as he danced around the column, oblivious to the quake beneath their feet. “You have not asked a single question since you came aboard the TARDIS. You are breaking quite a long tradition, and it’s a shame really. Don’t you want to know what I’m doing? Where we are? What’s Dundasia? What are you doing here?”

She chose the voice she saved for moments when Hawkeye was being a brilliant doctor rather than a wretched soldier, respectful but commanding.

“Doctor, there’s a time for questions, and there is no time for them right now unless the answers will let us help the 4077th any more quickly.”

“Spoken like a true soldier. No why’s just how high’s.”

It was clear he didn’t mean this as a compliment but she nodded curtly.

“It’s what I expect when I’m in charge and deserve to be,” she explained simply, implicitly conceding that they were clearly in _his_ space right now.

The room ceased moving and it was as if a deep drum had sounded. He made a puttering sort of sigh.

“Leave the gun, then.”

He exited out those blue doors again, and she followed, leaving the pistol on the pillar where a long coat was draped.

They were not in the Swamp. Tall fushia … animals... milled around in front of her, pulling boxes on wheels. There was an improbably high ceiling above them, made of a lavender light, and the ground absorbed all the force of her steps as it gave softly, turning her march into a prowl.

“Stay close,” the Doctor whispered, and then walked just as he had in the camp, with long, sharp steps. They approached a … wall or a window or a screen forty yards across the space. It said, ‘Dundasia Spaceport Immigration’ in large block letters across the top.

She watched the Doctor put his finger on a piece of writing that said ‘Tourist group’ and another that said, ‘Human–no hybrid.’

“How many people are in the 4077th right now?” he asked her absently.

“Forty-six,” she replied quickly.

“And how many casualties are you likely to get in a 24 hour period were the quarantine lifted tomorrow?”

She thought about all the major offenses planned in the area, their proximity to the front, and the weather.

“No more than fifty, at the absolute highest estimate.”

“We’ll call it an even hundred, then, to be on the safe side and to use a rather attractive round number.” He winked and then pressed more text that was appearing and disappearing from the wall too quickly for her to process. Looking pleased with himself, he then took out his piccolo and pointed it at the words, lighting the blue light again, and making it buzz.

A mauve box, just under the size of her trunk slowly emerged at their feet. She blinked at it, and then the Doctor, before bending over to grab the handle closest to her. The Doctor grabbed the other, and they carried it back to the blue box together, though it wasn’t truly too heavy for her to carry herself.

“Dundasians,” said the Doctor, though she still hadn’t asked, “Have figured out all sorts of really neat ways to use viruses to run their, oh let’s call it a ‘communications system’. Of course, they use ones totally harmless to themselves, but still kindly provide the necessary anti-virals and vaccinations for other species who visit the planet free of charge. At least in this era of their history.” Grin. “In any case, I suspect there might be a slight fault in time and space running through one of your nearby battle fields that got opened by sustained bombing. Probably something like a Dundasian radio or telephone fell through and shattered, infecting some poor bloke, who was unwittingly patient zero for everyone sent to your camp with him, and for you folks yourselves.”

They returned to the blue box and the Doctor opened the door with a snap of his fingers. They maneuvered the trunk in the narrow gap easily, Margaret having done her fair share of carrying the far heavier wounded across the compound on stretchers.

They put it down on the grating, and the Doctor opened it at a latch on the front. It opened with a hiss. He pulled out a glass vial out of many.

“One for every person in camp right now, yourself included, and anyone who comes through 22.5 hours after you are all clear. Which will take about the same amount of time.”

“I understand.”

“Then, back we go!”

As the room shook and spun some more, Margaret retrieved her pistol, and watched the Doctor as he did a lanky hop-step from one control to the other.

When she heard the drum for the last time, she walked calmly back to the door and lifted the trunk.

“Doctor!” she called into the box, after she had carried the trunk out and balanced it on Trapper's cot. “You’ve been a soldier before, haven’t you?”

He kept moving, and opened his mouth, clearly to say something completely unrelated but met her eyes and she could see the truth, easily.

“Then you know the relief of the belief that there is someone else out there who can limit the damage you can cause, just as you can do for others below you.”

She saw a flicker of introspection cross his face, though she could not tell whether it was for orders followed or ignored, given or received, and then he was that stranger she had met with Radar again, unknown and silent.

“Thank you, Doctor.”

He half-saluted, informally. “You are most welcome, Major.”

“And Doctor?” He inclined his head. “Get out before I have to fill out paperwork in triplicate about something I can’t quite put into words.” He laughed.

“Yes, ma’am!” The doors closed, and Margaret left the Swamp without so much as glancing back as noise and wind swept a few strands of her hair into her face.

She returned to the O.R. with the trunk. Sitting there, in the middle of the room, was a box of new needles, syringes, cotton swabs, and antiseptic.

Hawkeye stood next to it, looking significantly more at ease than when she had seen him last. He wasn’t quite smiling but looked almost fondly out the door behind her.

She looked at the supplies in askance.

“Radar insisted that it be ready for you, after you sent him back,” he shrugged and then focused on her. “Poor kid. Hallucinating about magically appearing, strangely dressed doctors who carry around blank paper as identification, it seems.” He winked, now reminding her of the Doctor, instead of the other way around. “He didn’t by chance have curly hair and really prominent teeth, did he?”

“Radar reads too many comic books, I expect.” She responded to his first comment in a tone that wouldn’t even have fooled Henry Blake, pointedly avoided the second, though she wasn’t wholly sure why, and abruptly segued into explaining the medicine’s instructions and properties.

He laughed and called for the remaining medical staff, handing Margaret the first few prepared needles.

“After you, Major.”


End file.
